Bulletin Issue 47 – June 2001

THE FOCUS OF THIS ISSUE: OIL PALM PLANTATIONS

Oil palm monocultures are being promoted and spreading throughout the tropics, impacting on nature and on people’s livelihoods. Given the importance of the issue and the lack of awareness about the impacts they entail, we decided to focus this issue of the WRM Bulletin entirely on this subject. Although the articles constitute a sample of the many countries where these plantations are being implemented, we believe that they provide an overview of the different problems and actors involved, which can be of assistance to people struggling at the local level against this increasing threat.

Oil palm plantations currently extend over millions of hectares of forest lands throughout the tropics. Further plantations are either being implemented or promoted in almost every Southern country where soil, (Read More)

More than 125,000 hectares of land are under oil palm cultivation in Ghana, mostly under the nucleus estate model, which implies a large plantation surrounded by smaller plantations established in (Read More)

On 13 June this year, Amnesty International released a report on Burma titled “Myanmar. Ethnic minorities: targets of repression.” The report states that for the last 13 years this organization (Read More)

Jambi province, Sumatra, is one of a number of areas where the newly empowered regional government is pushing for major expansion in oil palm plantations. The provincial governor has announced (Read More)

Papua New Guinea (PNG) possesses one of the planet’s largest remaining tropical rainforest. At least seventy-five percent of its original forest cover is still standing, occupying vast, biologically rich tracts (Read More)

In 1996, the World Rainforest Movement and the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Association (IUF-UITA,IUL) made a joint statement to the Intergovernmental Panel (Read More)

Despite the numerous social and environmental impacts of monoculture oil palm plantations, the industry is continuously trying to increase productivity and lower costs, which can only lead to even more (Read More)

-During the international negotiations on climate change, some governments committed themselves to reducing carbon dioxide emissions in their own countries. This very encouraging attitude from an environmental perspective –for the (Read More)